Maddow: Shutdown caucus is operating in completely different version of reality

Friday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow took a close look at the cabal of arch conservatives who are at the heart of the shutdown fight. Ensconced in deeply red districts, these tea party Republicans don’t care about the horrible polling they’re inflicting on the Republican Party as a whole, she said, but are more concerned about toeing an ideological line.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) and others who have fought against Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner’s attempts at compromise, Maddow said, “have a different set of values” than average Americans. They are seeing the world through an ideological lens and therefore perceive an entirely different set of realities confronting the American people today.

“Where this crisis is coming from is not a mainstream place,” Maddow said. “The mainstream and the rest of politics are playing with a different deck of cards than the guys who started this thing.”

“I don’t mean it in a derogatory way,” she insisted. “I mean it in a descriptive way. They have a different set of values. They have a different sense of what is normal, a different sense of what counts as reasonable politics in America.”

Failing to understand that this crisis, the shutdown and all of the current political turmoil emanating from the right fails to take into account that these people are operating with an entirely different set of goals.

Poll after poll, she said, is showing that “Americans hate the shutdown and they hold Republicans responsible for it.”

One would think that the shutdown caucus’ reaction would be to rethink their strategy, but no, their response, said Maddow, is to say, “Those polls are skewed!”

This makes the shutdown advocates, the debt ceiling “truthers” and the other right-wing forces driving the GOP completely unpredictable, and in Washington, she said, that can be a dangerous thing. When jobs and livelihoods and the economy are on the line, “unpredictable” is not a positive thing.

About the Author

David Ferguson is an editor at Raw Story. He was previously writer and radio producer in Athens, Georgia, hosting two shows for Georgia Public Broadcasting and blogging at Firedoglake.com and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book.